Panic Reaction on a National Scale by David Burkhead

Panic Reaction on a National Scale by David Burkhead

So, for some months now we’ve been engaging in greater or lesser degrees of restrictions in order to “flatten the curve” (although now people are claiming it’s to completely stop–more on that in a moment) of COVID19 (which I like to call “Winnie the Flu”).

– 2002: Predicted up to 50,000 in the UK would die form Bovine Spongeaform Encephalitis (“Mad Cow Disease”). To date, there have been 177 deaths from that cause.
– 2005: Predicted that up to 150 million people would die from that year’s Avian Flu. In the end, only 282 people died from that strain.
– 2009: Swine flu this time. Based on Ferguson’s advice a UK government estimate was 65,000 deaths in Great Britain. Actual deaths? 457.

So, given this stellar track record, the real question is: why did anybody give this idiot any credence at all when he admitted using undocumented 13 year old code intended for a then feared flu epidemic and not for coronavirus?

But, governments around the world, including those of the US and its component states, saw those dire predictions and panicked.

“Keep social distancing, stay at least 6 feet away from other people.” Why six feet? For viruses carried in normal breath it’s dramatic overkill. 3 feet, a fairly comfortable “personal space bubble” for most people in most situations, is plenty. Droplets carried by coughs and sneezes go farther, much farther than 6 feet. So in one situation it’s inadequate. In another it’s overkill. This is a case where “somewhere in the middle” buys nothing. If you’re going to dismiss the sneezing and coughing issue (maybe by expecting people to cover their mouths–which they should be doing anyway) then six feet buys nothing over three feet. If, however, you’re concerned about sneezing and coughing then six feet is as bad as three feet.

“Gatherings of no more than 10 people.” Um, okay. Ten people in the local Petsmart. Then 10 people at the drug store. Ten people at Kroger. Ten people at the local park. Ten people at a blot (call it a “bible study and support group” for those of a Christian persuasion). And so on. One person going from place to place and now all those people are exposed.

And a lot of things just seem to be so arbitrary. Married couple who live together sitting together on a bench? Separate, more than 6 feet, or be ticketed. Really? In what way does that make sense?

Man surfing all by himself. Arrested for violating quarantine orders–and put in a jail where he’ll be in enforced close association with a bunch of other people. How is “in jail” better from a perspective of slowing the spread of disease than is “surfing all alone, not another person in sight”? Boating (so long as no more than 10 people) okay. Drop a baited line off the boat (fishing) and that’s a violation. How does that make sense?

Then there’s New York. New York is a city utterly dependent on mass transit. So, shutdowns reduce the number of people traveling every day? Well and good. But with fewer people using the mass transit, the city reduces the number of subways and buses running, thus ensuring that the remaining ones are every bit as packed as they were before the shutdowns. Packed subway cars, a perfect breeding ground for the spread of disease.

COVID19 is largely harmless to people who do not have serious co-morbidities, to people who aren’t the very old, or with significant heart and lung problems. So, nursing homes are filled with the most vulnerable people. So why require nursing homes to accept COVID19 patients? Yet that was exactly what Cuomo ordered.

There is absolutely no sense to the restrictions being imposed on the American People in the name of COVID19. They range from the useless to the deadly. This does not mean that there are not things that can be done that would actually help the situation:

– Wash your hands.
– If you’re sick, stay home (unless you’re sick enough to need to go to the hospital).
– Isolate those who are most at risk (the elderly, those with significant heart or breathing problems).

Really, you should be doing all of that anyway. If COVID19 gets people actually doing that then that’s a win. Not worth the other nonsense but, “it’s an ill wind” and all that.

But the rest? Not only useless but actively harmful. First, from the way diseases work, you want the low risk people to get the disease. Get it, get over it, and stop being a risk to everyone else. You want it to spread quickly and thoroughly through the low-risk population. By slowing that, you delay when “herd immunity” is able to protect the higher risk people. And then there’s the other effects of all the restrictions, the effects on the economy. People keep trying to dismiss that as “millionaires profits” but economic damage extends far beyond some millionaire having to find a less expensive brand of champagne. It causes suffering and death for real people.

– Because rising unemployment kills people. We’re already, as of the last figures I’ve seen 11% higher unemployment than before this started and it’s going to go a lot higher before we’re through. Another figure I’ve seen is that each 1% of added unemployment leads to 2 additional suicides per 100,000 population. Do the math.

– Because food shortages (which we will have) and outright famine (which, if we don’t have here, other people will because the food we normally export we’ll be keeping to make up the shortages here) kill people.

– Because delaying other medical testing and treatment in fear of “the Rona” will kill people. This is not a hypothetical. A friend of mine had a breast tumor biopsy delayed because “elective procedure” (“elective” in medical terms simply means “can be scheduled” rather than “get him in the OR right now or he’ll be dead right now”).

– Because people going violently “stir crazy” by being cooped up at home and not able to engage in their normal activities kills people.

This “shutdown” that people are trying to call a quarantine (an actual quarantine is where you isolate the sick and known or at least suspected carriers until they’re no longer contagious) also kills people. And nobody, at least not at the decision-making levels, is doing any kind of realistic assessment of the costs (human and otherwise) of the measures being taken vs. the cost of the disease itself. At least then one might be able to chart a course that leads to the least suffering and death.

Instead, we’re getting a panic reaction, people running around with their hair on fire not even realizing that they’re just fanning the flames.

Oh, and those who are beating the panic drums in order to use the “crisis” for their own cynical political ends.

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334 thoughts on “Panic Reaction on a National Scale by David Burkhead”

I’m sick of reading about coronavirus, but I was glad to read something succinct and non-crapola.

This week I watched a friend have a complete online meltdown because she was stupid enough to ask us, “Be honest. Do you wear a mask?” Her response to “no” was “Do you not care about other people?” It’s become clear to me that it’s envy and power.
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Envy, because she and one of her children have underlying conditions, so they need to stay home until herd immunity gives them better odds.

Power, because she can wield their illnesses like a cudgel. If you value returning to a normal life, you’re against her.

Knew a racer who used the Vaga as a race car with the “stock” 4 banger (stock lift cam, and a stock Holley/Weber carb body, the rest stock untouched parts, they ran some dumptruck flywheel and used the big MO) and the engine builder said they ran 3 races between rebuilds, 4 just in an emergency, and if they ever tried to run a 5th race the engine was guarantied to “Blow the [eff] up”.

I have been told by people that I trust know these things that if you put in a modern small-block V6 or V8 in a Vega that is in good condition, it’s a pretty good car for it’s type (two door, rear wheel drive). It will definitely pull off most car races.

I think the Vega was why DeLorien tried to get out of GM and start his own car business. The vehicle design work had so many problems that it wasn’t funny. They used an all-new aluminum block for the engine-and bolted a heavy steel carburetor on it. Aluminum is softer than steel, and having that huge heavy weight there wearing out the heads of the engine block wasn’t good for it.

They used an all-new priming and painting process to paint the Vega, and because it would save money it didn’t have wheel well liners. The new priming and panting process caused air bubbles to appear and you would have bare metal spots that would become rust spots and eat the car away very quickly-usually where you couldn’t see it until it was too late. Such as the wheel wells.

They built the Vega in a newly renovated factory with robots and such. The robots had issues, GM was low-balling the union workers, and the line’s production numbers were raised so high that the employees were barely able to keep up. People on the line would, in protest, stick something like a Coke bottle or a beer can in the body panels and it would make all sorts of noise…

The Vega was a good concept, but the point between concept and execution should be taught as a “how NOT to do things” lesson. Almost as bad as the Mark 11 torpedo.

custom injection would make it easier. I’ve seen a carbed one that was not well done and it almost cleared everything but the carb and the distributor, Go crank sensor, coil packs and modify or print a low intake, et voila, a racier looking Tiger/Cobra.
But with some of today’s high tech 4s you can get near 5.0 power with far less weight.
One could always go the dry sump LSx Chevy too. The all alloy LS is fairly compact and has a carpton of aftermarket for swaps. But then you’d need new rear diff, axles, etc.
and BRAKES! lots and lots of brakes.

I put a small block Chevy with a Powerglide in a friend’s ’69 Spitfire when I was in high school. His girlfriend could weld; she cut the frame rails where the Triumph transmission went and flipped/reversed them to get clearance for the much larger GM transmission. The Triumph box was about the size of a lunchbox. It had a cardboard transmission tunnel, which was of course too small; I laid layers of wet newspaper over the transmission, laid up fiberglass over that, then pulled it off and dug the newspaper out. Form-fit transmission cover.

He went off to college and took the car with him; last I heard he’d given it to some student group who yanked the V8 out and were turning it into an electric car. I’m sure their golf-cart surplus bits were very satisfying to them…

I’ve had several British sports cars… enough that I don’t want any more. In my experience, all the old jokes about maintenance and quality control were both true and understated…

On the other hand, I wouldn’t kick a Jensen FF out of the garage.

The FF was a somewhat frumpy looking British sedan; the fancy version of the Interceptor, which wasn’t a beauty queen either. It came out in the mid ’60s. Jensen wanted the Interceptor to be sporty, so they fitted it with… a 383 Chrysler big block. The FF added a four wheel drive system adapted from a farm tractor and mechanical antilock brakes adapted from a Harrier fighter plane. The “farm tractor” bits were the Ferguson viscous coupling system, which almost all modern four wheel drive cars use; so effective it was outlawed by Formula 1, USAC, and other sanctioning bodies as giving an unfair advantage to Ferguson-equipped cars.

In 1966, the FF was a Q-ship. In the days of skinny bias-ply tires, the FF had an unbeatable traction advantage, and four wheel disc brakes with ABS meant it could stop, too. And, of course, the American hotrod market fully supported the 383 when you decided you could use some more oomph.

I had a co-worker who had a Jensen-Healey. One Friday after work, he expounded on the fun and games that entailed checking and correcting the valve lash on the Lotus engine. As I recall (sobriety was optional that afternoon) you measured everything, then put in a set of shims to get the valves set right. Not sure if you had to replace all the shims once you started.

I had a college-special MGB in ’72. A ’64 that tried to answer the question “what’s the point of unibody construction when there’s more rust holes than body?” It didn’t kill me, though my ignorant use of DOT 3 US brake fluid made for a couple of exciting starts to morning commutes. The natural rubber picked cold days to completely fail.

A dozen years later, I owned a TR3A; fun car, but it spent considerably more time apart than I really wanted. Never did get the pieces for the soft top, so it was decidedly a fair weather car. Dealing with the (regularly breaking) pin that handled the clutch made me nostalgic for my old ’75 Celica’s 5 speed transmission. Actually, the 20R engine (or the never versions) would have done nicely, too. I never wanted to push the handling of the Triumph so extreme tuning wasn’t in the cards.

Outside the P/U that’s my first choice of models. Most anything else in the lineup is tied for third.
Well, the Hawks would be 4th though, they are close to Avantiness in my book for the ugly to cool factor, but the cool just wins out.

Yeah I liked the ’60s Avanti. I concur kind of ugly but the cool wins out. You want cool/beautiful find a picture of a 1935 Commander. That is one sharp looking car. Though not as nice as Auburns or Cords. Yes I spent much time at car shows as a young man 🙂

see Spain
Spain had a damned good private care system along with their National one. I know of several athletes (mostly motorcycle racers or cyclists) over the years, who went there for operations by docs who developed procedures that extended their careers or saved said careers, and it all got Nationalized in the name of this panic. It’s gone.
I predict Andorra will get a few new doctors, soon.

There’s a good economic reason for hospitals falsifying those COVID stats, the extra money they get from a COVID death helps offset the money they’re losing due to not being able to do “elective” procedures.

It seems a trifle strong to accuse hospitals of falsifying stats … Say, instead, that they took the path of least resistance. In an emergency like this there isn’t time or personnel for in-depth autopsies.

For example, if you find thirty dead bodies in a burned out building there is scant reason to check their lungs for evidence of smoke inhalation.

Or if somebody saw a presidential press conference about the possible medical benefits from chloroquine and then drank fish tank cleaner …
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But if he drank himself into a fatal stupor because he’d lost his job due to Colorado’s lockdown and being bombarded with negative CCP Flu news all the time, it would be a COVID related death if you look at it just right.

> why did anybody give this idiot any credence at all when he admitted using undocumented 13 year old code intended for a then feared flu epidemic and not for coronavirus?
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Hey, it’s probably a better “model” than the sekrit mystry code that the globular wormening alarmists base all their figures on.

Besides, it’s a “model”. Like equations, what happens inside the box is magic that is not to be questioned.

Goreball Wormening “Prediction” is based on even older code, but it works perfectly, giving them the numbers to beat over everyone’s heads to meet their ends (to wit, Give Them Power Over All!)
Doesn’t need to be accurate, just needs to scare enough people into the “proper” actions.

.Yeah, we got a nice close look at the coding standards there in 1997 at East Anglia. Of course, the code isn’t really important if you’ve “pre-adjusted” the data you feed into it. See using numbers from China and Iran in WuHan Flu models.

The thing is, it’s anything-in/garbage out with this code – nobody can get it to produce the same result given identical starting inputs when run sequentially on the same hardware in single-thread mode.

It’s utter crap, and when the academics say they just average the results of multiple runs they are just averaging random crap results.

It’s to the point that the code reviewers are pointing the academic code writers to programming manuals so they can possibly learn just what it is they are doing so basically wrong (from the second review article):

.An average of wrong is wrong.There appears to be a seriously concerning issue with how British universities are teaching programming to scientists. Some of them seem to think hardware-triggered variations don’t matter if you average the outputs (they apparently call this an “ensemble model”).
Averaging samples to eliminate random noise works only if the noise is actually random. The mishmash of iteratively accumulated floating point uncertainty, uninitialised reads, <a href="https://github.com/mrc-ide/covid-sim/issues/168&quot; broken shuffles, broken random number generators and other issues in this model may yield unexpected output changes but they are not truly random deviations, so they can’t just be averaged out. Taking the average of a lot of faulty measurements doesn’t give a correct measurement. And though it would be convenient for the computer industry if it were true, you can’t fix data corruption by averaging.
I’d recommend all scientists writing code in C/C++ read this training material from Intel. It explains how code that works with fractional numbers (floating point) can look deterministic yet end up giving non-reproducible results. It also explains how to fix it.

Yeah, I knew that would happen when I added the quoted text, but I screwed up the copy-paste of the embedded link html in the blockquote bit – and of course comments are set in carbonite as soon as you hit go, because WP, so indeed DE.

I’ve seen this somewhere else.
Their model works perfectly for what too many of them want. It doesn’t need to be accurate, it just needs to justify their control over others for themselves and their paymasters.

Some of comments on the first review went a little too far in my view. I sketched a ‘In Defense of Badly Written Academic Programs’ before realizing I would not want to disclose the conflicts of interest.

Sure, code that hasn’t been done adequately should not be a basis for significant policy. The adequate programming skillset is rare enough that it is too valuable to be wasted by making sure every academic project is up to even basic standards.

Yes, ideally, the academics making their work sexier with ‘working programs’ and ‘data’ would also be educated in knowing good code from bad. It is a lot of specialized training, and CS programs already have issues without being coerced into ‘teaching’ and passing folks from other disciplines. Because it might not be possible for everyone to learn to program, and the administrators and activists are already irritated about how ‘few’ people are getting degrees as it is.

Yes, it might be a good idea to reduce the number of people being moved through the university system, or to severely trim the range of disciplines practiced in academia, but the commentators did not appear to be raising those questions.

Academic CS appears to be a pure science, I doubt university bureaucracies could recognize the programming-as-engineering skillset, and I’m not persuaded industry knows how to train and credential folks at the scale that would be needed if all academic programs were required to be sound. That is before the question of whether the people trained in Silicon Valley also have institutional shortcomings that should prevent them from being thrown at every problem in the world.

The fields of academic ‘knowledge creation’ are broken up into searchability/accessibility ghettos of people who think they know what they are doing. It very much is not the case that every field is subjected to scrutiny using the full list of best practices from all fields. (You’d probably kill off the actual knowledge creation if you tried. Huge committees formed from very different backgrounds.) There’s reason to suspect that more than one field is using something borrowed from another field very badly. Looking at the lockdown skeptics blog, and remembering that ‘chemistry paper replication’ blog attempt some years back, it seems like there are academics who get very pissy if folks outside the field examine their work. There are reasons to react that way I can sympathize with, but it looks bad from an outside perspective.

The magnetic fields of the Earth and the Sun strongly interact. Solar minima are the result of weak solar magnetic fields. So there would be an effect on the Earth’s magnetic field. The Earth’s magnetic field is generated in the core.

I’m not going to say that’s the mechanism, but there is a coupling between the two phenomena.

I think the volcanic to minimum activity is still not fully understood, but there is a cause and effect lurking there. the Sun’s fields affect on ours in ways still not fully known. It’s one of those statements like “Trees cause smog” that look dumb at first glance and when delved into turns out to be not stupid at all.
It just seems that every minimum, we get more than average eruptions adding to the cooling (fun thoughts, no?)

Though I sometimes wonder if I’m being unfair to zombies. They’re usually transformed into that form against their will, be it via some virus or magic. The idiots I’ve referred to chose to be the way they are.

It just seems that every minimum, we get more than average eruptions adding to the cooling (fun thoughts, no?)

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Time to get out the St Helens T-Shirts? The one with the (not to scale) with the cascade volcano’s ranging from Shasta to Olympia in the northwest, with St Helens in the middle captioned in the ash plume cloud “Okay boys. A 1 and 2 and 3 …” … Hey, only 40 years late, but a microsecond in geological terms.

We now have better ways to measure the sun’s energy output than counting sunspots. What do the solar observatories and various solar monitoring satellites show? ARE we getting less light and heat? How much less?

How much more cosmic radiation is getting to the upper atmosphere? What is the effect on cloud formation?

Sarah has contributors here that are actual scientists that study this stuff, which I am not, but from an interested tyro perspective, yeah, things are measurably different – solar wind is showing differences, and the basic lack of impulse compressing the earths magnetic field is letting more cosmic rays through into the atmosphere, which in turn does things not completely understood to the weather. In the past the connection between cosmic rays and weather (cloud formation) was a crazy out there fringe theory, but it’s becoming more accepted.

There are also not fully accepted theories about connections between solar coronal holes and things like earthquakes, so a connection to vulcanism is not completely impossible, but that stuff is pretty fringey at this point. It could be crap and it could be like continental drift and plate tectonics, i.e. not yet accepted but eventually will be.

Not really sure facing the prospective of living through a new little ice age is fully offset by the chance to quantify a grand minima with modern instrumentation.

Before I was able to plug in my tablet for quality music, the radio hit the top of the hour news.
CBS news
Ranting and raving because Upstate NY is sorta opening using the WH guidelines, and not the Full Massively Convoluted CDC version and had some “Doctor” rant that it leaves it up to the localities and states to decide and were not proclamations from high, and that “Scares EVERYONE in the Medical community”
Managed to not punch the radio and got my music playing to shut the propaganda up.
Work just changed our mask rule to allow home made masks to be used.
one non-medical mask is just as bad as another, and their lovely el-cheapo Mad In Chin wonders have a hard time lasting a day and that’s on me not wearing it but maybe an hour in total. so far the week has had only one of the masks not come apart in some way before the day was out, and I may have worn it 20 minutes that day.

I have lost a huge amount of trust in a number of medical folks. No, your opinion does not overrule mine. And many seem more concerned about their workload than actually helping. Why I keep coming back to taxing all “essential” salaries over min wage plus $3 or something with all proceeds to dept of health and UI.

And, all too often it is like LA’s “Dr.” in charge of health there. Listen to the Doc, right?
Her doctorate is in sociology.
Or Docs like Dr. Me On Camera! who hasn’t seen a patient in years/decades and is a political position placard,
As someone who had a great uncle who was in a near vegetative state from the drug stupor induced by the cocktail his doc prescribed to him, I have little faith in “Take it from me, I know, I’m a Doctor.”
Great Unc’s doc died, and his new one blanched at the file, dropped a ton of the meds, and Unc was driving within months. The man lost almost 30 years of his life to it.

Had it happen myself. Spoke in a metaphor similar to “seeing or hearing the black dog”. Got put on meds for schizophrenia. Next doc thankfully removes but only after gained something like 40# in a few months.

As for falsi, I’m almost certain I’ve had more patient contacts in last year than he has thru my entire life. His last treatment was under Nixon. He’s a bureaucrat with an MD and the bureaucratic precautionary principles in full swing here.

Only thing I will note is that a PhD in something like public health should be held by folks running department of health’s, mostly to minimize potential treatment tunnel vision if was an MD. But I have little trust given that the places these creds come from are institutional unlearning

Actually, I’d listen to one of the bio-warfare guys from Fort Detrick before I’d pay attention to SomeRandomMD.

The Army is all *about* killing people, and are actually pretty good at it, when allowed to do their job without interference. For that matter, we now know the CIA has spread infections through the American populace to measure how plagues would be transmitted. But no, we’re listening to some academic poseurs.

In the 1960s only 60% of freshmen entering Univ. of Okla. Med school graduated. Today there are maybe 30% more medical schools than then and they get their undies in a bunch when more than 2% drop out. So guess what I call the bottom of the clsss today.

There was also that Nam draft. As you may have implied a lot of yahoos who never should have been there were hanging out in ED by their teeth to keep that deferment. Sadly many “graduated” so that we enjoyed a crop of even worse than usual teachers. Oh that grade inflation was so successful that a stroll down a hall in the ED dept of U of Houston in 1982 treated you to a wall of As

In the 1980’s I bumped into far too many Johns Hopkins pre-med students who were SURE that THEY would be exceptions to the rule that Johns Hopkins Med School does not take Johns Hopkins pre-meds. And every single one was a complete prick.

I dropped out of Johns Hopkins undergraduate program (should have gone elsewhere, but met my Lady, so I’ll stick with what I got), and hung around Homewood campus for several years. In that time I met TWO pre-med students I would trust to lance a boil.

I have had generally good luck with the medical profession, but too many of them comport themselves like Priests, and not like the glorified mechanics they are.

Radio Paradise allows downloading days and days worth of their stream. Great background work music. The locals are playing most of the same dreck they played in ’84 when I left (he says as Bowie – Heroes from ’77 is playing on RP).

This, exactly. I wonder how much of this lockdown crap is aimed at destroying small, independent businesses. Perhaps it wasn’t deliberate, on the part of idiot politicians, but it sure is working out to benefit Enormous Corporations Whose operations managed to keep going because they had pockets deep enough to jump through all the hoops, put stickers on the floor and install plexiglas shields in front of the cash stands.

I really want Trump and McConnell to announce that any bill that has bailouts for states still locked down after May 1st won’t see the Senate floor. Maybe that will prompt the likes of Nipplerings, Inbred, and Ate-a-Polis to stop holding their citizens hostage.

How Ferguson’s model spread is known. Three Silicon Valley bro’s with a global warming background sent an email to every governor telling them how many people in their state would die if they didn’t immediately lock down. This was followed by cascading closures. We shouldn’t forget this.

I was on a call yesterday discussing “forecasts”. I wish they’d stop that since so many are just panicked rumors. Now it’s children dying, well no, or they’re going to make the NYC Subway appointment only to relieve crowding on the platforms. Best thing to do would be to find out what is, but we don’t do that. I mean how does one contract trace something that millions of people have. Do they not know any math at all?

The interesting thing about the Kung-Flu model is the fact that the people “responsible” for it will *not* release the version* of the source code that generated the original numbers. The trainwreck that’s still present has been improved, so the people working on it say.

(The code is in a github repository, but apparently the relevant revision has been blocked off or otherwise made inaccessible. Way to earn trust, guys. We’ll reserve a bloc of lamp posts just for you, too.)

In order to go faster, the program runs on multiple cores (= parallel execution). Making a (useful) parallel program produce identical runs with the same inputs (= determinism) is *hard* and has given rise to many PhD theses. It is trivial to do it wrong.

Apparently even the Github “fixed” version gives different outputs for the same inputs depending what computer you run it on.

This is not a case of “garbage in, garbage out.” This is just garbage out no matter what you put in.

I also understand this professor is cheating on his wife with a hardcore “Extinction Rebellion” Greenie, who is cheating on her husband as well.

And that’s why we have social distancing and lockdown.

I’d say Sweden got it right, but they’re covering up by not reporting deaths in assisted living residences and not treating the old sick people. The truth about Sweden is that they’re letting the Useless Eaters die and calling it a win for socialism. Which is more nauseating than the Ferguson Fraud.

And even though they deleted all previous versions, many of the changes since it went into github have been recovered and expose how much more crappy it was before the crappy officially released version – see:

Oh yeah, I remember their fearmongering. IIRC, no matter what the date, 10 days from now was going to be DOOM, DOOM, I say, unless Oregon went to full Gretchen Whitless lockdown. The Kate Brown one was bad enough. (FWIW, the site is still active, and worth a chuckle.)

The names weren’t familiar, but it’s a whole ‘nother Silicon Valley since I was there.

My favorite was the Wyoming graph.
Even now, it shows much the same graphs (assuming “all restrictions removed”), though they had to admit that the R0 had dropped below 1.0 in some states. Poor bablies.

THEY prayed for a recession, got WuFlu and are using it. Now we are gong to be hammered with 2nd wave b.s. to keep us in line. And that TDS afflicted Fauci is starting a NIH study with hydroxychloroquine and Z-pac. And to insure poor performance excluding zinc which studies have shown to be the effector agent in that cocktail. And being NIH this will blow through a few million bucks.

and then, if they’d stuck with WH recommendations only, they could really blame Trump, but no, they went for various forms of Whitless.
Claiming the pain is Trump’s fault when he is the one saying “we need to make it hurt less” while they are saying “Look, if you complain about it hurting any more, I’ll just arbitrarily extend the hurting, so shut it prole!”
Trump played it well in letting them decide. No matter how right or wrong he is, when they blame him he just has to say, “I let you decide what to do. Anything that you did wrong is on you.”
The press will spin it but not many are buying the spun b.s.

Lord, I fully expect that here in Mich when the state economy tanks so hard from these ongoing lockdowns / you can’t sell item X, Y, or Z (that have nothing to do with anything else) that the first place the state Dems and Gov W will be pointing fingers will not be at themselves, but at OrangeManBad.

Who didn’t declare the state lockdowns or what could or could not be sold or opened.

Ugh, the only thing worse than Gov W getting another term in 2 yrs would be Biden getting in the WH because the Dems manage to use Covid and all the pain that’s now coming from it, against him effectively…

The reason it can work without added zinc is that we always have a supply on board. Essential for some enzymes. But the amount will vary and folks taking mineral \vitamin will perhaps have enough. My wife loads me up with zinc tab during flu visits. But not everybody will have the necessary amount on board

I always keep some on hand, Cold-Eze lozenges, Zicam melts or generic equivalent.
Taken at first symptoms of a cold, the zinc shortens the duration of the cold.
I’ve been taking one a week prophylactically ever since I learned about the mechanism of HCQ with Zinc re the King Flu. Can’t hurt to make sure my reserves are topped off.

I got to stand outdoors in 90 degree heat in the sun for two hours yesterday in a mask, at least ten feet from other people. Gee, guess who got heat stress? (Yes, I was sucking down cold water as often as I could.)

The problem with the Ferguson model isn’t just that it’s old — but that it’s secret. The excuse for it being secret is that it’s old and undocumented. Baloney. 13 years is not old; I work on 60 year old undocumented assembly language code for a hobby, and I’m far from alone in that.
Secret models are of course the foundation of the Cult of Warmism, and the same thing for the same purpose appears to be going on here.

As mentioned elsewhere the actual problem with it is ‘non-deterministic outputs.’ You get different results with the same input. The commonality is the results are always wrong in the Too Big direction.

aka: its a black box designed to output a big number and scare politicians.

The problem is garbage in garbage out run by an academic with a history of huge forecasted death tolls that turned out to be squibs and sleeping with other men’s wives. Even if the model calculations were stable, the assumptions were completely wrong and I don’t buy the argument that there were too many unknowns, by the time it metastasized the Diamond Princess data were available.

That said, non-linear models are hard. To build, to interpret, and to understand. we humans don’t do well with them.

With that post you opened up a slew of areas for discussion. Don’t know about now but some time back every dept head at NIH was a physician. lt could be discussed about how well they understand, much less adhere to the scientific method. Then I would say the scientific method could only arise in a culture that believes in a strict adherence to the truth. We have imported into our scientific community folks of whom it can be said that truth is flexible. I speak from personal experience on that score as do a large number of retractions in scientific literature..

I think a major driver behind the large number of retractions is how we fund science these days. Instead of a wealthy aristocrat making a hobby out of showing up those French bastards modern scientists have to apply for grants. That means making your research sound sexier than everyone else’s. Checking the work of other people, people you’ll probably be working with or for at some point in your career, isn’t nearly as sexy as pushing the frontiers of knowledge.

You also have to consider what those PAYING the grants want to hear. If your research leads to the ‘wrong’ results, you will find NO funding. Science is controlled by politics, almost all of it hard-left.

At least in the old days, there were a number of rich patrons with different agendas. Now, science funding has all been centralized. Wrongthink gets no money.

I credit much of the shift to Nixon pushing money gov grants. Can remember gov begging profs to take 5 K grants (big bucks in 1961). Apps tossed in trash.Then we were given the EPA and that loser War on Cancer hat pushed really big money and promoted so much bad science Nature had to create Nature New Biology to print all of it. Today I have seen posted the need to prove ablity to get US GOV funding to be hired at (most?) universities. Will add my opinion that grant driven research is more technology than true science since it is goal driven

What? We have tons of old undocumented code around the house. None of it is secret.

U are so right.

I used to crack the Apple games I bought. Didn’t hand the games out, but it was mostly more fun than the game.
Drilled a hole in the side of the disk drive case to adjust the speed of the drive with a screwdriver….

I’m someone who suffers from depression, occassionally bad enough for medication. I’m about to call my doc to see about starting up again.

Here’s the thing. I am NOT suicidal. Never have been. Don’t think I ever will be. And I can see it from here. It’s the other side of a huge deep canyon, and I have no interest in finding the bridge. But I can see it. And if I can see it thanks to the stress and worry and gaslighting going on, I’m guessing there must be way more folks than normal who have found that bridge and are most of the way over it.

I think a lot of my, call it despair, is that when this is over and people can admit that we massively overreacted, and wrong reacted, who do we go to to get our lives back?

Personal note on depression getting much worse than normal – was at the post office yesterday. Left ahead of someone in a mask. So I thought said person would appreciate social distancing, since I was not wearing a mask, and nipped out as fast as I could without holding the door. Masked wasn’t holding more than a letter, wasn’t like she needed help with the door.

Masked kicks the door before it closed, bashes it open, proceeds to cuss me out at high volume.

I got home in one piece, but spent a considerable portion of the afternoon about as low as I have ever been without inhaled wheat exposure. And part of it, frankly, crying. Because straw, camel.

I’ve already lost decades of my life due to other people’s malice and stupidity, and just when I was digging out of that, bam, lockdown. Aaaaand we’re back to all the arbitrary, cruel rules you have to guess at every day that I spent most of my life fighting.

I don’t /do/ suicidal. Why save the opposition the work of murdering me? Make them take some risk they wouldn’t otherwise, do everything I can to make the process more difficult and unpleasant for them. Opponents, not collaborators.

Have been having a difficult time. When I’m flat on the ground trying to recover from whatever, it isn’t the specific stimuli, it is all the crap.

It helps me to know that some of my problems are self-inflicted, and potentially something I could fix in the future.

And some of the internal emotional problems took a turn for the worse with no obvious cause. So it is probably a medical cause, temporary and fixable. I can definitely do better on the sleeping front. Thinking about it reminds me of some appropriate tasks from the self-care list.

My reaction to the idiots is to salute them with my middle finger (can’t use both since one hand is holding my cane). I have no tolerance for the useful idiots and even less for the commufascists who make use of them.

That was me yesterday. Some idiot was in a crosswalk, stopped, fiddling on her phone. So I start driving again. And she immediately wakes up, starts walking directly towards us and starts yelling. Because I would have seen that she was picking up something that fell if I hadn’t been “speeding through the parking lot”. She’s lucky i was on the other side of the car and driving or there would have been cops called. I *still* want to go find her and beat the ever loving crap out of her.

It doesn’t help at all that we had to take one of our cats to the vet on Tuesday; she was 17, hyperthyroid, probable early congestive heart failure and failing fast. She’d lost her appetite and therefore over a pound in the last two weeks.

But damn it hurts. We love all our pets, but every now and then there is one who goes from beloved pet to full-on family member. She was one of those. I’m missing her more than I’ll miss some of my family.

The other full family kitty we lost was to cancer, back in ’96 when heme was only 11. Still miss him something fierce. But I have to giggle a bit when I imagine the look on the face of anyone who ever digs up that patch of the yard. The friend who helped us bury him (who shot himself about six weeks later; May through July are crappy months for me, bad anniversaries and my birthday which most of my family, even my parents, forgets) built a crypt from old roof slates and insisted we include a tin of food, a feline viking burial.

Our 5 year old cat, whom I found in the bushes when he was maybe 15 or 16 days old, right at a pound, has Acute Renal Failure. Best we can hope for is Chronic. Worst, we’ll lose him. He’s was down 3#s from his highest weight (he bounces 9 to 9.5#s normally), but gained 1/2 of a pound back. Still eating (on special diet), but also is on anti-nausea medicine to keep it down. Thought he was doing better, until last night. But he seemed to be unsteady on his feet, clingy, agitated, eyes unfocused, just off. He won’t be any harder to let go than prior pets we’ve said good bye to, but it won’t be any easier, with more regret because of his age, with the full knowledge we’ve done the best we can for him, given his personality. He was diagnosed two weeks ago. Probably sick for another week to 10 days before that.

I’m so sorry. Euclid is somewhere between 21 and 22 (he was about 1 when we got him in 2000) and though he cries in the middle of the night, he’s still eating and behaving like…. himself.
it might be worse. We keep dreading the time….
Older son has decided grandcat moves with them. Renal failure, being treated, but Robert is his whole world, kind of like Petronius with Dan Davies. So….

I deal with this shit every day. Writing is a good outlet, I can create demons and blow ’em all the way back to Hell with grossly unfair weapons. Crudloo the All Consuming meets starship fusion drive, film at 11. Take a bite of that Crudloo, you f*cker.

Makes me feel much better. And best of all, when I’m done killing the ever-loving shit out of the Bad Guys, I can -sell- it and get money. Rinse, repeat, pretty soon the Phantom can get up in the morning and face the day like a Real Human.

All I can say is, This Too Shall Pass. Its not much consolation, but fortunately its still true.

Just remember that when this is all over, and it will be, Karen will still be a worthless bitch and her miserable life will still be its own best punishment. And her little dog too.

Trying to keep other people happy is a losing proposition. I never do it, except with close relatives and then only in the most demanding circumstances. Such as don’t show up to Aunty McCassar’s funeral in running shoes and sweat pants. For that I’ll buy a suit, smile sweetly and say nothing for a couple hours.

Try turning the circumstances around so that they have to keep -you- happy. That’s a much better situation, easier on the frayed nerves.

Failing that, find the forbidden square and stand on it. Maybe do a little dance. “I’m standing on the forbidden square! And these are my middle fingers!!!!!11! Come and get me!” Quite satisfying. Better than a long weekend. ~:D

The correct response to all those ASS***ES is, “S.O. W.H.A.T!1!!!
And move on.
I’m older then most dirt, and my philosophy is/has always been, “I don’t suffer fools lightly.”
Had to take an in-person psychological test for my last job.
One of the questions asked was, “What do you consider one of your major weaknesses?”, and I answered with the above.
A little later the question was, “What do you consider one of your primary strengths?”, and I told him the same thing. A few minutes later he decided we were done.
Got the job.

Nope, I’m not going to do something that feeds Karen’s sense of self-righteous self-importance. I am going to tell them they’re being stupid, and then explain their stupidity to them in minute detail. When they flee from the Badspeak, I’m rid of them.
———————————
Dark Willow: “Bored now.”

We have to go to ourselves. We have to be more wary and watchful, we have to take back the ballot box and the soap box, we have to keep our politicians on shorter leashes—local, state and federal. We start with the 2020 elections, and go from there. Baby steps, and not easy or convenient ones. We keep building around and building under, taking back culture one book and film and story at a time.

We did it in 1775-80, we did it in 1836, we’ve done it locally at other times, we can do it again. (We shouldn’t have to do it again, but people are people.)

We definitely have to take back the ballot box. In the meantime,I just got my damned hair cut. stick that one up your jumper Gauleiter Murphy. Rebellions start from small things. The barber, who is no Trump lover, did nothing but complain about CNN fake news. First slowly, then all at once.

And start something on the side. And make more things.
I should write on this.
I’m laying by as much food as possible for winter. Because it will relieve the pressure, and me and mine won’t starve. Or go full on diabetic.

It’s planting time again. The tomato seeds are now sprouted (Siberians did really well; got *all* peat-pot cells to sprout, others did OK, failures got reseeded), and we just got the zucchini seeds in peat pots. I have to prepare the modified muck-buckets for carrots, and will start them today or tomorrow. The seedlings will go in the ground in early June (because it’s frippin’ cold here), with excess seedlings going to good homes.

We’ll donate some of the zucchini but will dehydrate as many tomatoes as we get. The carrots are a second iteration of an experiment; I got the first batch to grow some years ago, but kept the plants too close so they were tiny.

Once the garden is done, I’ll be doing a chicken coop/run. Too many predators (winged and footed) to let them roam, so it’ll be a 10′ x 12′ run. We’ll see how long it takes to do this.

Sadly you’re not only. And the shut down only exacerbates. I moved the week before so no more doc. Have meds thankfully but my option is basically to go to ER when the hits strike. And because that’s a career killer I just suffer. I would rather have wuflu than suffer this. Thankfully stuff is opening so I can get out

I am told by medical personnel that I trust that depression and insufficient Vit D3 level frequently occur together. Causative, correlative, or coincidental? No one knows, apparently.

I’ve been taking 20K IU per day for the last year an a half to keep from dropping into depressive spirals. It’s remarkably effective. I can get low, but not as low, and I can’t stay there for any sustained length of time. (As a side benefit it seems to reduce the duration and severity of menstrual cramps, in case that’s relevant to anyone.)

I recently read some doctor was recommending D as all of his WuFlu patients who had mild cases had normal levels and all his severe cases had low or very low levels. He was recommending supplements on the grounds that it might help, it won’t hurt, and it’s both cheap and easy. Both my husband and daughter have to supplement, so I’m probably low too, so I recently added them to my regimen. It would be nice to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak. Thank you for the info.

And all the people who will smugly say “Well of course you think we overreacted. Because the apocalypse didn’t happen because everyone did what we said” will continue to think that that is true. And want people to listen to them next time. Massive amounts of “post hoc ergo propter hoc” discussion will be happening.

Then note Ferguson just resigned because his mistress defied the Regulations (!) to travel across London to see him. And he was OK with that, giving the impression he doesn’t think much of his own model.

I followed your link to the New York Post article about Cuomo trying to reverse the ‘nursing homes have to take corona virus patients’ order without admitting anything was ever wrong. While there, saw another headline:

Greta Thunberg Added to CNN’s Expert Coronavirus Panel

I’m not even going to ask ‘Are they IDIOTS?‘

At least we can be sure the Gretazoid knows as much about corona virus as she does about meteorology.
———————————
This is an EX-PARROT!!

Yep – same people blew up when Senator MD OPHTHALMOLOGIST OPHTHALMIC SURGEON Rand Paul, who got the bug, recovered and tested clear, and so volunteered to work the COVID-19 wards in his local hospitals, made cogent and pointed medical statements in questioning “Dr.” Fauci, who as noted above last saw a patient in the Nixon administration – and then were all okeydoke with Greta the scolding climate wonder teen appearing as an expert.

Public discourse is just broken, solely due to TehTwitster and Zuckerbook.

And said medical statements were to the extent of saying that the country is not New York and that data shows that states that have not gone full lockdown have not shown the levels of devastation that city saw. So that perhaps places not hard hit come august could open schools. Not like he was debating whether vent pressure should be 12 mmhg or 18 mmhg (random number).

Also I will say that that Nixon quip is from memory and I did not go search out but he’s been a research nerd/bureaucracy politician his entire career.

I have noticed a marked insistence from certain quarters that the infection numbers from NYC should be extrapolated to the rest of the country. That the physical conditions in NYC differ greatly from the rest of the country does not matter to them at all.

Its that faction of the Left that only believes in science if it supports their agenda of the moment. If it suits them to note the difference between infection rates in a subway car and a ten-acre field, they will note them. But if it doesn’t suit them they will scream that there IS no difference, and you will wear your mask in a ten-acre field or you want to kill old people for money.

These are the same people who quote national murder rates and compare the USA to Japan, as if that actually meant something. You can’t even compare Manhattan to White Plains just 20 miles away. The two places are utterly different. Murder rate or Corona infection rate, they cannot be compared. Because apples and oranges.

Arguing in bad faith is natural for them, it seems. I’m seeing a lot of it lately.

Oh, like the “number one in cases and deaths” Line? NSS. when your population is 50x the one compared to anything will be more prevalent. Population wise china is the only real one close and even being credulous, I hope that if videos of complexes being physically sealed resulted in more than a few acts of, shall I say swamp ghosting, so the response taken would not have been plausible. You would have had cops firing on those being kidnapped. And it goes down from there.

Most of the people who say they love science don’t have the first flipping clue what science actually is. For example, you can safely ignore anyone who says that they’re following science when responding to Wu Flu. It’s a novel virus, which means that we’ve never seen it before. That means that there’s no data, which means that there is no science! Appeal to Authority is a logical fallacy, not least of which because even authorities can be wrong. The probability of them being wrong is inversely proportional to the amount of data we have on the subject.

Had a guy at work today claim that looking at the measured radiation dose to try and figure out what unmonitored workers could get in certain areas wasn’t scientific, but his model that consists of assumptions about how long people worked in various areas and basic math was.

I’ve been “wondering” why the nursing home numbers in NY were so different from the others. Turns out, wait for it, they were lying. As a New York City boy, born and bred, I am shocked and appalled that my governor, the hizzoner the mayor, and the other top health officials would falsify a statistic that made them look bad.

Somebody hung a sign on the Long Island Expressway saying Cuomo killed my mother. It begins. The backlash will, I hope, be breathtaking.

My son sent it to me but I searched for Cuomo killed my mom and found lots of hits. I did make a mistake though it was upstate not Long Island. Long Island came in because there’s a woman there who is hopping made at Carnage Cuomo.

Let’s just say that Andy, and Gauleiter Murphy and whatever that idiot in Pennsylvania’s name is are not universally popular among the people. Their little ruling class bubble out the hamptons yes but the rest, not so much. I thought it was just my bubble, but I got an earful today from people who are not normally Republican admirers.

He killed a lot of people’s mothers. There’s some anger there I expect.

NY is a funny place, you know? IMHO, from living there its about the most capriciously fascist place I’ve ever been, including Canada. Regulations on all kinds of things that make no sense whatsoever, but they’ve been there since the 1930s.

The very idea that a state governor can order a nursing home what patient they’re going to take, and then they -do- it? Its crazy. But worse, he orders them to take known infectious patients during a pandemic emergency and house them in a known vulnerable population… and they -do- it? They don’t tell him to shove off and mind his own business? Complete drooling insanity.

Putting recovering COVID patients on the hospital ship while it was in harbor instead of sending back into vulnerable populations would have been a great use of an underutilized asset they had at their disposal.

Much as I hate to defend killuomo, I think part was that the ship was not set up for cv patients. It was eventually reconfigured but the intent was for stuff like trauma, heart attacks, and strokes needing beds and or ICU. Iirc there were difficulties as well because they had to have preclearance to be put on ship.

I think it is another case of one of my two biggest complaints about Trump, namely that he is too trusting of his employees. I get exactly why (do something like preside over an agency that is supposed to be the reinforcements in an emergency like a pandemic and open the supply door to an IOU and you’re gone) but even without the antagonism of govt workers they are by nature hidebound and risk averse. Saying no to a change is safer than yes, even if the change is supported by teams of data. Must check all ticky boxes in the right color ink to do what he says. (Meanwhile anything harming him hoes)

It’s part of Falsi’s reason for shut down 4 evah. And since he became the media face, the political angle if he is overruled isn’t just the now standard whistleblower retaliation argument and leak to the house committee to impeach the president but also that he will be the face on every newspaper with ‘told ya so’ when people do continue to die (of course they will; people still die of black death IN THE UNITED STATES).

The national media has been the source of almost all the Ill that this disease has wrought with a help from courts. The only way to not have imported would have been a flight ban or mandatory quarantine of pax even if there was a 15 minute test back in February. That would have lasted 15 minutes before a judge said no,schools need foreign students so unconstitutional, never mind US citizens and residents. Best way to minimize, quarantine NYC and suburbs. Look at what happened when Raimundo floated that quasi voluntarily. As soon as fransicko locked down the die was probably cast, imo

The only way to have MAYBE kept this strain of coronavirus out of the United States would have been a total travel ban starting in SEPTEMBER 2019. It was loose in October 2019, in China anyway. Looks like it got to Seattle and Portland within days.

All it takes is ONE Patient Zero and you’ve got…a new strain of the common cold, which can be deadly to people who are already hanging by a thread. People in such conditions have been dying of the common cold for thousands of years.
———————————
Bring out yer dead!

It would come eventually, yes. But would it be as catastrophic with a single point of origin rather than 2? Plus I bet much of the west coast doesn’t have second homes they fly to and winter in. NY not quarantining is what got everyone house arrest

I’m just arguing from the publicized and popularized since that’s how panic driven. This was honestly a no win solution and imo still is, solely because honesty is a vice today and will hurt you before it helps you.

The honest answer of science can’t save you, wash your hands and so on would be touted as uncaring and evil plus falsi and his fellow cultists would be screaming opposite in moments.

The sky is falling we did do was obviously more damaging to economy than any other option even if 2million saved (using the initial and later estimates)

Being generous, the difference between this virus and 18 flu is solely that it is LESS symptomatic in more people so easier to expose the susceptible unknowingly and the only possible cure is your immune system, like almost any other virus (to my memory the only “cures” have come around in last decade and mostly for the chronic stuff like hep). Keep it away from the elderly and it’s less dangerous than flu

Can’t read while walking! What, you have to stop if you look at a sign with words on it?

Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean (I think). My own attempts to read books while walking were somewhat curtailed by a few incidents of walking into things into which I would rather not have walked, but still….

OT for this post, but on topic for the blog as a whole, a comment I made in a private chat:

Something that struck me when I’ve seen old Disney movies (The Cat from Outer Space a good example) is the…. well you could call it naivete, or innocence.

If there is trouble people will probably help, the government may be ignorant but isn’t doing more than humanly possible to be evil, the police officer is a decent guy not a thug with a badge, citizenship is something of value; enough that the alien cat wants it (see also gov not being maximally evil), etc, etc, etc, etc.

Sure propaganda always shows a positive view. But this also had to maintain *some* level of suspension of disbelief.

I’ve noticed similar things, especially if you watch an original and then a remake. The one that comes to mind for me is “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”

Original, the message (to me) boiled down to “get your act together and get yourselves under control or we’re going to keep you penned up on your planet.”
The remake was more “You’re a nasty, horrible, awful species, all of you, so we’re going to wipe all of you out in a horrible way with these nanomachines while savings the animals.”

I could cheerfully re-watch the original (and it came out before I was born,) but the remake?
Not a chance.

It seems like the mindset of the country in general has drifted from “we’re not *THE* best people, but by {deity} we’re TRYING, each of us individually and as a whole, to get there,” and it’s now more “we’re horrible and awful even for those things that were done before any of our grandparents were even born and we should grovel for forgiveness because everything bad is all our fault, all of us!”

“we’re horrible and awful even for those things that were done before any of our grandparents were even born and we should grovel for forgiveness because everything bad is all our fault, all of us!”

I HATE this line of “reasoning”. It’s so bloody PRESUMPTUOUS and arrogant, and those who espouse it don’t even see it. They want to be lauded for their humility and take pride in doing penance for imagined wrongs.

We got “white guilt” *hard* in elementary school in California, in the late 1960s. Already being unwilling to accept blame for something I didn’t do, saying “I never did any of that” resulted in a trip to the office and a parent-teacher conference.

And now, we have “diversity” laws which enforce racism by law… such is progress.

The Damaging Fraud of ACA-5
By Peter Kirsanow
California’s progressives are determined to legalize racial discrimination in college admissions by passing ACA-5, which overturns Prop 209 forbidding such discrimination. Their purported reason for doing so is to increase “underrepresented group enrollment.” The “underrepresented” groups are black and Hispanic students. The campaign to pass ACA-5 will, therefore, focus considerable attention on the alleged benefits of racial preferences in college admissions to black and Hispanic students.

Even if one accepts the proposition that the state should be permitted to engage in racial discrimination in college admissions, an increasing number of studies show that racial preferences actually harm their intended beneficiaries. Black and Hispanic students admitted to colleges for reasons of racial preference are, as I have noted previously, far more likely to flunk out or rank at the bottom of their respective classes than their white and Asian comparatives. This is particularly true in science, technology, engineering, math, and law.

The phenomenon is due in large part to what Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor call the “mismatch effect.” The GPAs and SAT scores of black and Hispanic students admitted due to affirmative action are dramatically lower than their white and Asian comparatives, leading to profound performance disparities between the former and latter cohorts. These disparities result in these students being significantly more likely to cluster in the bottom quartile of their respective classes and drop out entirely. In contrast, with race-blind admissions, black and Hispanic students are more likely to enroll at schools that are a more appropriate competitive match, thereby increasing the probability of graduation.

ACA-5 is a toxic two-fer: It legalizes the odious practice of racial discrimination and hurts even the alleged “beneficiaries” of such discrimination. The only group it benefits are the charlatans of identity politics.

I’ll toss out the difference between the 1960 space program and now, even without the layers of bureaucracy. Bush had proposed a moon to Mars mission succession plan. That got changed by the next administration at least in part because it was Bush’s idea. Then in 2016 we are back planning it. I have no clue what to call the drool covered plan Biden will order next spring, probably just Xerox Obama’s since that is all he is.

The tech to do it is there. The skills were there, and the manufacturing know how is out there. But there is no agreement on doing it and the pendulum swings getting too violent for progress

“Then there’s New York. . . ” Central Park remains open for sun-bathers, etc. Beaches – closed. My best guess is that NYC govt is mostly made up of elites – and Central Park is their type of place. The beaches in NYC are not for them – they’re for the peons out in Brooklyn. They go to “The Hamptons”. Apologies for those who don’t know NYC geography. After all, it’s all really just a New Yorker comic cover.

I am pushing 60, diabetic, take medication for tachycardia and episodes of shortness of breath. My daughter has been diagnosed with reactive airway disease. These are issues that make both of us at elevated risk for something like CV19. Nevertheless I oppose the utterly ridiculous “precautions” being taken in the name of Winnie the Flu. It’s my responsibility to look after my own health and I’d like to have the freedom to do so. I’d like to be able to work to provide for myself and my daughter. I’d like to be able to work and do my part in producing the goods and services that other people want to provide for their families. Some reasonable precautions and advisories? That I can see. This rampant panic? Well, see the blog post above.

Except they have never believed “my body my choice”. What they believe in is abortion/ They have no qualms about telling other people what they can and cannot do with their bodies when it comes to smoking, drinking, salty foods, sugary foods, etc. Little dictator Michael Bloomberg is the perfect example. At the same he pushes for abortion screaming about personal choice, he was actively banning big gulps, sugary snacks and whole plethora of food he did not think other people should be able to ingest into their own bodies.

“I identify as a member of the COVID Immune community. Where do you get off dictating how I can identify? Stop oppressing me, do not attempt to impose your identity construct on me, you identitarian Imperialist!!!”
–

Our county seems to have an anti-Karen force field around it, though the 30% take rate on concealed handgun permits might possibly have something to do with it. Not too many jerks in town (though DUII numbers on the highways might be getting interesting).

It’s largely that, with a bit of thinking that the area of the state that has the worst of virus (such as it is; Oregon’s case/death numbers are pretty low) has a distinctly different culture than what we have here in the flyover counties. OTOH, we’re stuck with the lockdown (up to stage 1, first level reopening), but the lockdown has been more of an issue than fear of the virus.

(Thought: upstate NY might have less of a Karen problem than the southern areas.)

The take rate on masks is 30-50% in the grocery stores, but I haven’t seen as much as a harsh look at the maskless.

The karens are just school bullies or meangirls– they pick targets when they think they have an advantage.

That can be that they think the local authorities will do as they say, or it can be that they think the target is vulnerable to their preferred manipulations.

For example, the gal who went off on Crossover was probably responding to seeing her start to hold the door, then remember social distancing and getting further away. So there was a known vulnerability, there, because of the desire to be polite.

Girlfriend was on the phone with her mom the other day, who is in her 90s and grew up in France (her mom was 17 when the allies landed at Normandy), Her mom apparently heard the term Karen for the first time and was wondering what it meant. When told, her mom said “Oh, we just called them collaborators”.

No. If I wanted her dead you would be on the ground having bleed out as I rifle thru your stuff to find her address to introduce her to a pillow.

Wanting a classical evaluation of risks is not murder. And those that argue it run the risk of the introduction. Especially as people start to have less and less to lose. So far it has been restrained to protests and businesses giving the salute.

I’m going, like, dude, you did notice the feds already blew more than two trillion on emergency relief, right? What money have they got left? As if the federal budget is not already fifty times more dire than California’s.

Honestly, I get the argument of force majeur for the months of march thru may since politicians have given up on debt. But the states and localities still get sales and property tax while the collapse of economy will hammer the feds for the same time (Federal taxes are income and consumption basically). But there is no excuse whatsoever for any bailout other than ‘tax revenue for same period last year minus tax revenue for same period this year’ x some multiplier (1 or less). You’re not going to be hiring up hundreds of cops or firefighters because by the time they get thru the required training it’ll be moot. More overtime, yes (although this is a continuous problem that the cynical can suspect are intentional to make sure that that sweet sweet OT money keeps coming in for the union seniority winners). Let’s also say same rules as a normal emergency declaration (Stuff like purchasing masks would be reimbursed by govt).

But this is not that.

There is no way that the average state tax income is 80 billion each (What would be required for the 1T asked for even across all states.) And what is being asked for is just by 5 states. That is garbage

Since it’s just a matter of what goodies the reps negotiate out of nanzis bill, any bailout must include across the board pay cut for employees. Maybe allow for streetside fire/police/ems and the working medical staff to remain as was although I think all should be hit since we’re all in it together.

Insurrection Act. Trump can end all this tomorrow by finding that it denies the citizens A right, privilege, immunity or protection named in the Constitution.

Nancy doesn’t have the votes because blue wave hasn’t come (the special election in Cali was huge.) The blue states will re-open or their government will be removed. I doubt it will get there since people are coming out of their shell.

The SE was honestly no more a bellwether other than that pollsters once again are very fallible. Voter apathy (it’s for what, 8 months, 2 of which would be lame duck and much of rest just more wuflu) and the fear imposed with all this (more dems buying hook line sinker) would have definitely screwed with. Plus this was a district only flipped two years ago. While it did vote hill in 16, this vote didnt have the hated evil orangemanbad on it. Hatred does drive a lot of the left voters (union bus drivers and cemeteries keepers drive the rest)

Nancy doesn’t have the votes because blue wave hasn’t come (the special election in Cali was huge.) The blue states will re-open or their government will be removed.

At least one of the remaining liberal judges (and there are still plenty) will throw it out and I doubt Trump would be willing to pull a Jackson. (“Judge X has made his decision. Now let him enforce it.”)

He could, and you could probably argue that morally he should, but it would be a bad idea politically. If he trashed the state governments that are holding us hostage the Democrats and the media (BIRM) would scream to high heaven that Trump has finally become the dictator they said he was. Since his actions would spare the nation and the blue states from the worst of Democrat stupidity Trump wouldn’t have anything to point to to defend his actions (“things aren’t as bad as predicted because we took action early” is an argument that only Democrats get to make).

On the other hand, if Trump lets the Democrats lay in the bed they’ve made they have no one to blame but themselves. They might try to blame the Wu Flu, but the Republicans can just point to the red states that did open and are doing much better both economically and on the Wu Flu front (they’ll have more herd immunity when the next wave comes around in the fall). If things play out the way I believe they will this strategy will discredit the Democrats for a generation. What’s left of their bench after the Obama years will be done nationally, and possibly locally. Pence’s running mate might face an actual challenge.

Trouble is, the Democrats are masters of blaming everybody else for their most blatant failures and abuses. They blame ‘conservatives’ for ‘police brutality’ in Baltimore, where there hasn’t been an authentic buck Conservative sighted since 1966. They blame ‘white supremacy’ for the Chicago ghettoes. ‘Conservatives’ again, for the lead contamination in Flint where Democrats didn’t maintain the water system for 30 years.

They CARE, so nothing can possibly be their fault!
———————————
In Glorious Socialist Workers Paradise, ONE size fits everybody! If clothes not fit, must be YOU are wrong size. We have re-education camps, to make you right size. So, Comrade, clothes DO fit, do they not?

Their ability to get away with that has been eroding for decades, and that erosion has gone into overdrive the past 3 years. If the media spends all of May screaming about how Republican governors are trying to kill grandma but the numbers in September are better there than in the blue states, there’s no way anyone with a lick of sense is going to believe them when they say that Democrats are the intelligent party. I think Sarah’s First Scenario is more likely than it was a month ago.

Yes, I know that plenty of people without a lick of sense vote, but they aren’t actually a majority.

If and only if the fact that numbers are better is publicized. Majority of country gets news from comedy shows and social media. Note that State R has seen a 50% increase in cases while state D has seen only 20% will be what people remember. That this is occurring as state R’s has doubled daily tests and D has only 16% and admission stats are flat, declining, or identical will only be known to those that search it out. And even if its allowed to be published on socialist media to try and counter the fear, all those that have internalized the doom numbers will not allow themselves to process it. Its same as how king cuomo of the nursing home has 80+% approval while desantis, with a tenth of deaths and cases, is hammered

That’s where advertising comes in. The Republicans have had to fight uphill for decades, but Trump has shown them that it can be done and how to do it.

I wouldn’t take the current approval numbers too seriously. As the economic effects of Cuomo’s hostage-taking, and more information about his gross negligence in protecting the most vulnerable in nursing homes, DeSantis is going to start looking better by comparison.

Promoting the NY Charlie Foxtrot into a pissing contest between Cuomo and DeBlasio would be an effective strategy. It isn’t as if the two of them haven’t ample inclination to attack each other and there’s ample mud to cover them both. Similarly, California could be pushed as an spat between Newsome and Garcetti.
–

Two Coasts. One Virus. How New York Suffered Nearly 10 Times the Number of Deaths as California.California’s governor and San Francisco’s mayor worked together to act early in confronting the COVID threat. For Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio, it was a different story, and 27,000 New Yorkers have died so far
By March 14, London Breed, the mayor of San Francisco, had seen enough. For weeks, she and her health officials had looked at data showing the evolving threat of COVID-19. In response, she’d issued a series of orders limiting the size of public gatherings, each one feeling more arbitrary than the last. She’d been persuaded that her city’s considerable and highly regarded health care system might be insufficient for the looming onslaught of infection and death.

“We need to shut this shit down,” Breed remembered thinking.

Three days later in New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio was thinking much the same thing. He’d been publicly savaged for days for not closing the city’s school system, and even his own Health Department was in revolt at his inaction. And so, having at last been convinced every hour of delay was a potentially deadly misstep, de Blasio said it was time to consider a shelter-in-place order. Under it, he said, it might be that only emergency workers such as police officers and health care providers would be allowed free movement.

“I think it’s gotten to a place,” de Blasio said at a news conference, “where the decision has to be made very soon.”

[SNIP]

Breed, it turns out, had sent de Blasio a copy of her detailed shelter-in-place order. She thought New York might benefit from it.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, however, reacted to de Blasio’s idea for closing down New York City with derision. It was dangerous, he said, and served only to scare people. Language mattered, Cuomo said, and “shelter-in-place” sounded like it was a response to a nuclear apocalypse.

Moreover, Cuomo said, he alone had the power to order such a measure.

For years, Cuomo and de Blasio, each of whom has harbored national political ambitions, had engaged in a kind of intrastate cold war, a rivalry that to many often felt childish and counterproductive. When de Blasio finally decided to close the city’s schools, it was Cuomo who rushed to make the public announcement, claiming it as his decision.

“No city in the state can quarantine itself without state approval,” Cuomo said of de Blasio’s call for a shelter-in-place order. “I have no plan whatsoever to quarantine any city.” …
–

Well, and from the other direction: “Dude, the state budget looked dire before this fiasco. It could very well look direr (totally a word) now, but it never looked undire, even with all the DJT-boom tax revenues rolling in.”

But the Murkey News, now barely a couple shrunken pages in printed form, was never a real newspaper even back when the Sunday edition would dent cars if thrown incorrectly.

– If you’re sick, stay home (unless you’re sick enough to need to go to the hospital).

–
I had this whole paragraph on how the ONLY thing that comes out of this mess is the concept if you are sick, don’t send your kids to school or daycare, don’t go to work, and don’t drug up the sick person so they don’t appear to be sick. But you know what? The more I kept typing I realized, yes, true for the short term. Eventually it’ll be back to the way it was.

I liked the bit where he “only goes out to places where there are no crowds”–such as a movie theater showing Cats. Not only funny, but a reminder of the things we used to talk about and the jokes we used to make before we all got thrown in jail.

I saw recently that Roger Christian, director of Battlefield Earth, reported relief at being able to cede the title of “director of the worst major studio picture ever” after seeing Cats (or rather, the first fifteen, twenty minutes of it.)
–

In April we should’ve had our largest convention of the year. Didn’t happen. (They’re trying to reschedule for this fall, but otherwise our booth money rolls over to 2021). We should’ve had a smaller but decent convention at the beginning of the month. Didn’t happen. (Also trying to reschedule for fall, otherwise rolling over to 2021, but risk of conflict with dates for the Big Convention).

Today I should be doing final preparation to leave super-early tomorrow to set up for our spring outdoor event. We’re talking about an event where everyone’s camping out, getting plenty of sunshine (which renders virus particles non-functional) and fresh air (which blows them away), and having plenty of room to spread out. But it still got canceled, so we won’t be hitting the road tomorrow.

We also have two more shows canceled in June and August (and another show 4th of July weekend that canceled, but hadn’t invoiced us yet, so it never got onto the list of events). We’re hoping our mid-July show happens, because it’s our second-largest, and we have a smaller show at the beginning of October that we’re hoping will happen. As to our two November shows, neither of which we’ve bought into yet, and our fall outdoor event, it’s anybody’s guess what will happen with them.

So we’re hurting financially. All those goals for 2020 that I wrote out in a fine hand on a clean sheet of paper back at the end of December, probably will have to be rolled over to 2021. And you’d think that with all this spare time, I’d be getting crazy amounts of writing done — but I’ve spent far too much of that time just spinning my wheels, mind racing but unable to focus on anything long enough to do sustained work. I’m actually getting more productive work done on the vegetable garden and flower beds, and on cleaning the house and the yard.

And if we do have any road shows this year, I’m now looking at the possibility that we may not be able to listen to CD’s on the way. Yesterday while I was taking the van up to Sam’s Club on the north side to pick up more gardening supplies, the CD player was slow taking in the CD and I pulled it back out, thinking it was jamming. Now it’s giving me an error message. It may be just confused because I pulled the CD back out, and there may be a way to give it the equivalent of rebooting a computer. It may be dirty and just need cleaning. Or it may be worn, in which case it would need replacing. I watched a YouTube video on how to change the CD player in a GMC Savana van, and it looks doable, but it would be a monumental chore.

Yes, life’s gotten a lot more Interesting thanks to Winnie the Flu (as if it wasn’t already Interesting thanks to the home repairs from the Thanksgiving Eve windstorm). But I’m trying to figure out a way to get through. As soon as the replacement printer arrives and I know I can print up invoices and PayPal postage, I’m going to put a bunch more things up on eBay. And when I can get a chance to get back up to the storage unit, pulling the t-shirts, inventorying them, and seeing if they’ll sell on Shopify (tried on eBay, didn’t get a single sale).

I’ll be a little happier when I see those first pretty green shoots peeking above the soil in the vegetable garden. In the meantime, I’m trying to keep productive, and taking care of my people as best I can.

We were supposed to be on the road for our first project (we volunteer) May 1, but we had two projects canceled out. Now we’re supposed to be heading out after Memorial Day. I’m hoping this time will work, but I expect we could be having “adventures,” here and there.

Beloved Spouse is on the board of an Anime convention to be held in Norfolk on, IIRC, the first weekend in November. The convention center is owned by the city. The Con hotel is owned (franchised to Embassy Suites) by the city. If they cancel now, before running up costs of stuff like programs and guests, the forfeiture costs to convention center and con hotel will bankrupt them.

If a second wave hits and the city closes down after they’ve undertaken their con costs, they’re bankrupt.

If Virginia stays open and they have the con and scarcely anybody shows because they’re afraid of co crud from China (and because everybody’s broke from being out of work since March) … they’re bankrupt.

Right now they feel like they’re drawing two cards hoping for a full house.

This con has been convening for over twenty years and they’re sitting unable to dodge while a glacier heads down toward them. Sure glad that Virginia doesn’t have a panicky wannabe tyrant as governor.
–

Latest playground update: I saw what looked like the caution tape cut off the entrance to one of my local parks. When I went to look further, I found that it had indeed been removed…so it could be replaced with chains.

At this point, I think the most logical explanation for everything is that we’re stuck in a Disney Channel original movie where a bunch of evil adults are conspiring to ruin summer because they hate kids. If that’s the case, I would like to request that the Great Author (Great Screenwriter?) introduce me to the plucky gang who are working to bring the fun back so that I can surreptitiously help them.

Sign me up to be the crazy, absentminded lady who is mostly annoying, but is both good at distracting the Evil Adults and remembering random things that are plot useful but related to boring stuff. (Cleaning, fire regulations, etc.)

Just watched the governor of my state announce that an organization called Opportunity Labs would be giving advice on getting the public schools back open. Does anyone here know anything about the organization? The governor kept trotting out the words “equity” for the kids’ education – though I’m honestly not sure how you ensure that. (Also got to watch the leading health expert of the moment keep repeating there is a “strange and mysterious disease” attacking children and parents should get them to the doctor immediately. Way to calm fears people!)

Interesting word salad for the elevator pitch on their website. Presented without further comment:

The Opportunity Lab is a strategy and leadership consulting firm. Our unique Culture of Opportunity process provides comprehensive systems for growth within an organization. We also have a series of workshops perfect for independent use on the individual and organizational level.

Also got to watch the leading health expert of the moment keep repeating there is a “strange and mysterious disease” attacking children and parents should get them to the doctor immediately. Way to calm fears people!

–
per Aunt, late 70’s, who has reason to know, and my mom agrees, because of me, says the symptoms being reported about the “mysterious disease” is Rheumatic Fever. Often transition from untreated bacterial infections (Strep Throat being one). Why Strep Throat, and other low fever bacterial infections, no matter how severe, should NEVER be taken lightly. More common when I had strep throat regularly, Scarlettina, and Scarlett Fever (late ’50s/early ’60s). Less common when Aunt’s oldest had Strep Throat, and Aunt was dealing with a severely physically handicapped infant (late ’60s).

Rheumatic Fever is nothing to mess around with. I was lucky, I had no repercussions. My cousin, has heart damage because of it.
–

Was in USAF basic training in 1966 and during a meningitis epidemic had a strep throat morph into “walking” pneumonia. I walked as opposed to being set back and retaking it all over. And that made the rest of basic training so much more fun. Strep is definitely not a bug to take lightly

In retrospect, what it look like it comes down to, consequences of Rheumatic Fever is why doctors threw antibiotics at bacterial infections like strep throat early and hard. But because of evolution of antibiotic resistant bacterial infections (IDK that strep is one of them but it wouldn’t surprise me), doctors wait to hand out antibiotics. Since the trigger into RF is variable there are consequences to not hitting bacterial infections, like strep, fast and hard, but then …. yea …

I ran into problems getting antibiotics for son’s ear infections. “Let’s wait to see if it is a full onset ear infection first” was the response. Accepted that the first couple of times. Subsequent times it was “Why? We’ll be back tomorrow!!!” Didn’t always work, at least at first. The words “I told you!” were uttered. It was a long dang 4 years … started getting them at about 9 months and continued until summer before Kindergarten. Every 6 to 10 weeks regularly. Ear infection, get treated, get checked, 100% cleared up, no water pockets. Even did a recheck a couple of times when the pattern was established. Everything was fine. Then 10 or so days latter? We were back …

We had no reason why Jeff kept getting them, other than “some kids do”. He out grew them. Never had problems because of swimming either. Never had to get the drain tubes. Pediatricians (we had 3) all agreed that between bouts his ears were 100% clear & dry. His cousins both ended up with drainage tubes, but their ears had water present between bouts.

– 2002: Predicted up to 50,000 in the UK would die form Bovine Spongeaform Encephalitis (“Mad Cow Disease”). To date, there have been 177 deaths from that cause.
– 2005: Predicted that up to 150 million people would die from that year’s Avian Flu. In the end, only 282 people died from that strain.
– 2009: Swine flu this time. Based on Ferguson’s advice a UK government estimate was 65,000 deaths in Great Britain. Actual deaths? 457.

So, given this stellar track record, the real question is: why did anybody give this idiot any credence at all when he admitted using undocumented 13 year old code intended for a then feared flu epidemic and not for coronavirus?

But, governments around the world, including those of the US and its component states, saw those dire predictions and panicked.

Why, because every other time people listened to him, nowhere near as many people as he said might die, did!

Very carefully ignore the lower end of the possible deaths bar and how far above what actually happens it is…. -.-

People should watch Michael Crichton’s speech that is on Youtube that he made after writing State of Fear and the research that went into it. Especially pay attention to the Chernobyl story at the beginning and how Yellowstone got so messed up making policy based on “TEH SCIENCE”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDCCvOv3qZY

Picked up some nuts and bolts at Home Despot today. Masks not enforced, but I think I was the only one without. At least no Karens nagged me about it. I was ready for it, too.

Karen: “WHERE’S YOUR MAAAAASK? YOU’RE KILLING GRANDMA!”
Me: How long have you been wearing that mask?”
K: “???”
Me: “That mask. How long have you been wearing it? How many hours?”
K: “XX hours.”
Me: “Well, it’s been saturated with germs for (XX-1) and a half hours.”
K: “???”
Me: “IF that was a medical grade mask, it’s good for half an hour. More than half an hour, it becomes a germ repository and SPREADS disease. Did you touch that mask with your little rubber gloves after you’d been wearing it for half an hour? Your gloves are contaminated, and so is everything you touched. YOU are spreading every disease you have been in contact with for the last (XX-1) hours!”
———————————
“There’s another dead bishop on the landing!”

Here in Texas, Karens don’t have nearly the level of official backup, and that limits their complaints to posting on Nextdoor warning everyone which businesses “never to visit again” because of supposed social distancing violations. That does have some teeth, because it has a rating feature similar to Yelp which allows them to tag the business from a directory and “Not Recommend” them.

Private, extended Family Graveyard, annual meet, greet, mow, gravestone clean, meeting. About 20 people. No masks. No handshakes, hugging OTOH didn’t stop. Out of the 20, I know 2 people were younger than I am (in their 40s, 1st cousins), I suspect another 2 were (in their early 50s), rest were my age (over 60) to much older (late 70’s to early 90s).

Technically we are family. Mom, me, 2 first cousins, and 2 aunts, and one uncle. The rest? Cousins, yes, many times removed. As in dad’s cousins grandchildren to great-grandchildren … but, you know, Family.

NOT one of the over 70 crowd was praising the stay at home orders to keep them safe. Not. One. More than one have major medical issues …

Free Speech Laws and Court Cases
University of Tennessee College of Law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds teaches a class about free speech and the legal cases that have impacted the courts’ interpretation of this part of the First Amendment.

So, most folks of any intelligence see that the tyrants are power grabbing. They mean it. They are not playing. We don’t get the Liberty back. They may loosen the leash, but they hold it going forward. The key question to ask yourself:

What are -you- doing to actually oppose tyrrany?

Not “what are your complaints?” They are not listening. But what to actually, actively, oppositionally -do-?

Don’t tell, don’t announce. I don’t want to know. Just -do-, or do not.

1) why the HELL would we claim a blanket solution to a wide variety of problems across multiple nations?
2) If you truly believe that these are true tyrants, why the ever loving crud would you publicly state so, and then ask others to declare what their actions are?

If you won’t oppose the local version of “give up more Liberty for empty promises of safety” , can you claim to be Free?

When someone tells you “you are not essential” , they have un-personed you. Your rights just got turned into second-class permissions. If you go along, you develop the habit of going along.

They will always have yet another excuse, more “emergencies”.

If -you- won’t refuse to go along, do you have any claim on Liberty? On someone -else- freeing you?

Don’t just passively go along with the latest usurpation, and expect they will stop there.

We’re you expecting someone else to do the hard and unsafe stuff, like saying ” no”?

If enough folks simply disobey injustice, it is powerless to impose. Or, they cross a clear line and folks put a stop to it.

But, yes, if you want Freedom, it has costs and risks. You can’t keep it on the cheap.

Our host is a resister. She chose not to go along. She has written of this. Her books often bleed American. I am so glad she chose to be of us.

Reason it out. Don’t wait too long to decide. -Lots- of ways to oppose the schmucks in-system before we get to “bad movie” stuff.

Think of any major tyrannical regime that formed in the last 200 years. What if ordinary decent folks had said “oh, -hell- no!” early in the movement? Are any of those outcomes worse if that had happened?

An acquaintance taught me “don’t wait to notice the showerheads hissing and smoking to decide to resist”.

Just like the coffee shop twerps– were this an actual tyranny, you wouldn’t have had time to post a second time.

…Unless you were helping the guys who actually do the disappearing.

We’ve got at least a half dozen people in here who are fighting depression tooth and nail, and you come up with a hysterically over-broad demand for what people are going to do to fight the tyranny.

*******

I don’t care for hysteria any more when it’s on our side than I do when it’s on theirs. Even when it’s wrapped up in high flying appeals to ideals which neatly gloss over those little important details that might actually lend themselves to effective solutions.

Oh! No! There are people grasping for power to which they have no right! And it shall never end!

Because that’s not every day that ends in ‘y’!

Quickly, deploy the presumption that anybody who isn’t Doing Something (with the implicit dismissal of everything folks here HAVE done, or mentioned others doing) is Passively Going Along With The Latest Ursurpation!

Then do a quick nod to the hostess, and follow it with a freaking Holocaust comparison.

Because that always works on folks who aren’t sure who to trust. They’ll go with the guy yelling “nazi.”

Real tyrrany starts small. It is fairly cheap to kick up a fuss when one still has something resembling a working legal system.

Better that than some bad flick from the 80s eh?

During the 60s, some folks plopped down at a lunch counter, and defied oppression. Others faced attack dogs for walking around on a public street. Absent fussing like that, nothing would have changed.

I for one am grateful those folks said “no more”, and defied injustice. I would prefer to resolve these matters without that level of conflict. To achieve that, some folks have to fuss now, while the fussing is cheap.

Do what you reason is best. Liberty wins, because it works. But only to the degree we work at it.

Disaster cosplay? really? In my goofy sneakers? I wouldn’t know how. That was unkind and way off the mark.

Do as you reason best. Or don’t do. Free country. Working on keeping it that way.

*Facepalms* If you think that was all bravery, rather than performing for the cameras and papers, when Bull Conners had already been voted out of office because Alabama was tired of segregation – go home. Read more history. A lot more.

So remember how Neil Ferguson’s model predicted 2.2 million deaths for the US?

Well, a friend of mine posted on FB the other day that according to the CDC, the Spanish Flu killed approximately 675,000 in the US.

I went to respond, “yeah, but adjusted for population that’s” and then did the arithmetic.

Population in 1918: 103 million
Population in 2020: 330 million
Factor: 3.2

3.2 x 675000 =

wait for it

2.16 million, which rounds up to: 2.2 million

Huh. What a coincidence.

You don’t think that maybe Ferguson’s model kept spitting out random numbers all over the place due to code only a professor could love, so instead he used one that was a straight line extrapolation of the Spanish Flu?

Looks like Charlie Hebdo was right in describing Houston as being inhabited by fascists and neo-Nazis. Baker seems an example of an identifies as Hispanic apparent would be mass murderer. 🙂

My bet is that Baker was talking about that ‘change the sense of identity’ thing, and that is context that Vaughn left out. Slightly softening the bolded section, but a political faction that demands that whites identify as minority has no principled argument against a demand that minorities identify as white.

And if Hispanic identity is political rather than blood, why is it protected like a blood based identity?